1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to communications systems, and more particularly to providing a real-time message routing communications manager in a communications system.
2. Description of Related Art
Modern telecommunications network carriers (“carriers”) typically provide a broad range of telecommunications services, such as 1-800 services, Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, and Calling Card (CC) services. Computing platforms, generally called Service Control Points (SCPs), are used for real-time processing of such services.
For example, a customer may contract with a carrier to provide a 1-800 service with intelligent call routing. When the 1-800 number is dialed by a caller, a 1-800 service request is sent across a telecommunications network to an SCP. A 1-800 service application executing at the SCP receives the service request and determines the proper call center to which the call should be routed, in accordance with routing parameters provided by the customer (e.g., time of day, call center volume, geographical origin of the call). A service response indicating the proper routing of the call is then returned through the telecommunications network to connect the 1-800 call with the proper call center. It is desirable that the service processing be transparent to the caller, maintaining real-time performance to connect the call.
Typically, an SCP is coupled to a telecommunications network via a telecommunications switch and includes one or more client server communications managers (CSCM) and one or more transaction servers. A CSCM interfaces between the switch and the transaction server, providing functions such as protocol conversion and allocation of service requests among multiple transactions servers (e.g. load balancing). A transaction server executes the service applications that provide services to the telecommunication network. Service requests, such as a 1-800 service request, are received through the switch by one of the CSCMs and sent to one of the transaction servers for processing by a service application. Optimizing the communication of messages (e.g., service requests and responses) among the CSCMs and the transaction servers is an important factor in maintaining real-time performance.
Traditionally, proprietary communication systems and communication methods have been employed to communicate among communications managers and transaction managers. However, open computer systems have gained popularity largely because customers wanted choices among multiple computer vendors to solve their computing needs. The growing use of distributed systems has given rise to a need to develop applications capable of running in an open environment while executing on a variety of different computing systems. Accordingly, proprietary communications methods are being replaced by solutions supporting open, published, and widely-available communications standards, such as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which is not specifically designed to provide real-time communications. For example, although the TCP protocol guarantees message delivery, there is no inherent mechanism for guaranteeing that a read or write on a single connection does not impact (i.e., decrease) the communications performance of other communications on that connection or on other connections. As such, a specialized communications application is needed to maintain real-time performance of calls involving telecommunication services in an open system environment.